Lions and Tigers and .... wait, what next? Bears? oh my!

So I saw the preview for Mac OS 10.whatever Lion.  Well, I saw an ad for preview but didn't click on it.  What's the point? I have kind of been buying new Macs at a rate that I think I only missed one (after entry into Mac market), and I got that from a friend.  So I will buy it.  I don't really need to know what's in it.

But my first thought was actually 'Lion? How do you go from Snow Leopards, which are really cool, to Lions which are kind of boring.'

Probably not the initial thought Mac OS developers were going for.  That said, the cat naming thing has worked out very well for them.  Nobody remembers what number comes after the 10.  If you really have to know you you go to the apple icon.  You know what cat you're running though.

It seems though that Apple wasn't really planning on using the cat names for the public, and this might have made for some problems long-term.  Of course, in the meantime they've had years where they can bring out software updates which have something that makes them sound distinct without having to crawl all over themselves making up weird names and hoping people keep track.

The downside is, they're out of big cats.  Seriously this is the last one.  I mean, in the way that Snow Leopard was related to leopard, they could use Mountain Lion, but that would be cheating.  Mountain Lion is the same thing as Puma and they already used that.  Of course, they also used Panther.  Unfortunately people seem to persist in the notion that a panther is a separate animal.  It is a word with several useful purposes.

First, its the genus which all big cat species belong to.  (Edit: Okay, I realize Panthera is not the genus for all the 'big cats' but it is for most of them.  Looking at this the 'all' just bothered me.  Making sweeping incorrect generalizations of any kind bothers me.) Second, it is then a convenient word to use for any big cat whom you can't identify.  This would be due to primarily to distance and ignorance.  Lions, tigers, and cheetahs, you'd have to oblivious and not care in the least to be unable to identify.  I can see where leopards and jaguars could be a little tricky from a distance in a zoo, but really, they live on different continents.  Mountain Lions live over such a huge range of the Americas that obviously people in South America did not get together with those in North America to decide on a common name.  Not knowing what to call it at any given location, panther always works.  The most common usage though, is for the black variants.  Unless you get up close you can't see the spots so it looks like a totally different animal.  I saw a young black leopard hanging out in a tree at a zoo, god was it a beautiful creature.  So I guess its free game to call any large cat with no visible distinguishing markings a panther

But back to OS X, they're pretty much out of options.  Snow Leopard was actually fine, its not a subspecies of Leopard its not that related.  But now, all they have left to go to the Clouded Leopard.  Which would be highly repetitive, difficult to explain, and rather anti-climcactic since they're the size of a medium-sized dog.  Not particularly big cat-esque.  They are very beautiful though.  I can't see them moving to small cats.  I mean the people who actually know what an ocelot is would probably find that amusing, the rest would be confused.

I noticed that the very first codename, before release, was Kodiak.  In the context of animals rather than film, they could have meant the Kodiak bear, which opens the intriguing possibility of returning to bears.  Unfortunately this becomes not at all intriguing very quickly when you consider the names of bears.  They almost all end in 'bear' and the modifier is not descriptive enough to differentiate.  I mean you could have Grizzly.  Having established a pattern, people might know where you were going when you came up with Polar next.  But after that, really, are you going to Spectacled?  Mostly we just call them brown or black, depending, well, on whether they're brown or black.  I mean the Glacier bear looks cool too, but same problem as Polar, even if they're not related.  So what category of animal could they move to?
Or is it time for an OS XI and some totally different nomenclature.

I still wouldn't mind a Siberian Tiger even if it is a subspecies.  They're just so cool.

Frustration

Well, I admit, the whole idea of a blog was simply a procrastination vehicle. There are, on the internet, many, many opportunities available for procrastination, and thus a blog has been left in the dust for me lately. Instead I watch youtube videos, play facebook apps, and now have searched even farther afield. Looked at blogTV today, for the idea of video blogging (why? you may ask? I have no idea, desperate times my friend, desperate times) and even, get this, something called karaokeplay.com.
So why did I call this post frustration? Well, I may have picked the worst possible time to extend my procrastination purview into these previously uncharted waters. It is pouring rain with 30-50mph winds outside, and no, I do not live in a tropical storm, just Iceland. This means microphones pick up wailing winds. It is 2:30am now. Hence I'm a little sleepy. My internet connection is definitely sleepy, which I am blaming on the weather, and there's the clincher for me.
Every time something on the internet does not work the way that it should work, there is always in the back of my head that it has some built in item that makes it microsoft specific, and, of course I run a Mac, 2 Macs actually. So, I'm clueless and too old to be figuring out these weird new sites? The sites are just impossible to sort out and/or badly designed? Or for whatever hidden reason my Mac is never gonna be able to play. The first makes me feel pathetic. The second annoyed, and the third angry. I don't even knowif Apple v Microsoft has anything to do with it. Nonetheless, I have had enough experiences with websites that just do not run properly on a Mac that I have to question. And that lingering doubt prevents me from whole-heartedly digging in and rooting out the problem and fixing it.
Oh, that along with the fact that its 2:30am, I'm tired, and most of all, isn't procrastination supposed to be fun?
In the mean time, at least for tonight, I'll stick with good old words. Weather, browser, OS, none of these can affect words. God I'm getting old. And technically I'm sure a terrible storm would knock out my power and my DSL connection, so lest you think I have illusions of constant connectivity, my head is not yet stuck that far into my computer.